Contracts and other legal documents requiring signatures are used daily in commerce. These documents need to be signed, stored and routed to the necessary location in a controllable fashion. As electronic documents and electronic signatures become more universally accepted and demanded there exists a need to create a signing process that is controlled electronically. Historically, electronic systems that allow for electronic document signature typically apply the signature to the entire document. Documents such as contracts are not marked up for specific signature locations, initial locations, data collection locations and other areas for signatures to appear in the proper locations. This lack of ability to mimic the paper process led to slow adoption. More recently, some newer electronic systems allow the user to place signing locations into the document but require the user to manually create the workflow and authentication steps for the document via time consuming and tedious processes, such as the insertion or creation of tag locations throughout the document where the signatures are to be placed. Therefore there exists a need for automating the process of placing exact signature locations, workflow, and recipient tasks into these documents so they can be sent for e-signature more easily, this is especially true for documents that contain multiple signing locations, multiple recipients and more complicated workflows.